Imagine you're a publisher, and there's a problem with the copy protection on the Direct2Drive version of your game. You don't have time to/can't be bothered chasing up the unprotected executable for the title (which you should have in easy reach), so you just browse to your favourite crack search engine, whack in the game's title, and download the appropriate hack.

According to a thread over at Ubisoft's forums, this is exactly what the publisher did with Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. A savvy user opened the latest game executable (v1.03) in a hex editor, and found the tag for a crack group known as "Reloaded". The patch responsible was once available from Ubisoft's support site, but has since been removed... which doesn't look good for the company.

The only official comment so far has come from a community manager:

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